Adaptation of the X-Ray Diffraction Technique to the Analysis of Residual Stress in Carbo-Nitrided Steel Layers

Abstract

X-ray diffraction is used to analyse the fatigue behaviour of carbo-nitrided steel layers. Measurements are therefore carried out on the two major phases of the material, i.e. the martensite (a') and the retained austenite (g). On such gear material, X-ray residual stress evaluations are particularly difficult for three reasons. First, the studied material is multiphase. For that reason, in each phase, the stress component in the direction normal to the surface is non negligible. Second, the diffraction peaks obtained on the martensite are broadened, due to the overlap of different reflections of the tetragonal structure. Third, the material contains also carbide and nitride clusters, which lead to incoherent and diffuse scattering of X-rays thus making quantitative phase determination difficult. In our paper the methods used to solve these problems are presented. The development of a new quantitative phase analysis method which accounts for the variation of diffuse scattering of X-rays is shown first. The second part deals with an iterative micromechanical model implemented for the evaluation of the carbon content and the residual stress components of each phase. These methods are used for analysing the evolution with cycling fatigue of all the parameters derived from our enhanced analysis (phase volume fraction, carbon content, stress components, peak width).